Lazy Eyes - How we read online.

By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 1:00 PM ET

 

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

It's a Jungle Out There
That's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Screens vs. Paper
What about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?

When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.

The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:

• Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
• Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
• Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
• Minimize reflections.
• Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
• Avoid MySpace.

Back to the Jungle
Nielsen's apt description of the online reader: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone.

And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer:

• One idea per paragraph
• Half the word count of "conventional writing"! (Ouch!)
• Other stuff along these lines

Nielsen often sounds like a cross between E.B. White and the Terminator. Here's his advice in a column titled "Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy": "A good editor should be able to cut 40 percent of the word count while removing only 30 percent of an article's value. After all, the cuts should target the least valuable information."

[Ed. Note: Fascinating asides about the writer's voice, idiosyncrasies, and fragile ego were cut here.]

He's Right
I kid about Nielsen, but he's very sensible. We're active participants on the Web, looking for information and diversion. It's natural that people prefer short articles. As Nielsen states, motivated readers who want to know everything about a subject (i.e., parents trying to get their kid into a New York preschool) will read long treatises with semicolons, but the rest of us are snacking. His advice: Embrace hypertext. Keep things short for the masses, but offer links for the Type A's.

No Blogs, Though
Nielsen may be ruthless about brevity, but he doesn't advocate blogging. Here's his logic: "Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easier to write. But they don't build sustainable value."

That's a debatable point. My experience has been that a thoughtful blogger who tags his posts can cover a subject well. But Nielsen's idea is that people will read (and maybe even pay) for expertise that they can't find anywhere else. If you want to beat the Internet, you're not going to do it by blogging (since even OK thinkers occasionally write a great blog post) but by offering a comprehensive take on a subject (thus saving the reader time from searching many sites) and supplying original thinking (offering trusted insight that cannot be easily duplicated by the nonexpert).

Like a lot of what Nielsen says, this is both obvious and thoughtful.

Ludic Reading
Nielsen focuses on how to hold people's attention to convey information. He's not overly concerned with pleasure reading.

Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading." Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:

• When we like a text, we read more slowly.
• When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.

Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.

I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.

Final Unnecessary Thought
We'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."

Source: Slate.com

Embedded Video Lifts Conversion Rate 50%: 5 Steps to Test Deliverability & Subject Line

SUMMARY: Videos embedded in email can grab attention or cause deliverability problems and rendering nightmares. Most marketers believe the latter, but a few say their data speak otherwise.
See how a marketer increased conversions more than 50% by embedding video in emails. Includes deliverability and subject line test data. Plus, what’s the best video length to use.

 

CHALLENGE
Conversion rates on email campaigns for a UK entertainment brand hit a plateau late last year. Carolyn Jacquest, Online Marketing Executive, Haven Holidays, and her team didn’t take the news lightly.
“We wanted something new and exciting that would bring the Haven experience to life,” Jacquest says of the amusement park and family resort. “We wanted to show what we had to offer visually.”
They particularly wanted to shake things up before the all-important summer season began. Enter the idea of stimulating conversion rates with videos embedded in the email message body – considered a no-no by some email experts.
CAMPAIGN
Jacquest and her team’s concept was emboldened by data found in MarketingSherpa’s Email Benchmark Guide 2008. It indicates that online consumers react positively to video, with in-stream video ads getting clickthrough rates nearly twice those of static images.
Haven’s email service provider also convinced Jacquest that, with the right preparation, an embedded video can be delivered successfully and catch people’s attention. Here are the five steps they took:
-> Step #1. Improve reputation
The first thing Jacquest and her team did was work to improve their sender reputation. Indeed, the idea of sending videos in emails almost begins and ends with deliverability concerns.
This boiled down to *regularly* observing one best practice – routinely scrubbing their list to get rid of addresses that were bouncing in the months leading up to the test.
-> Step #2. Produce video
The creative process began with Jacquest and her team deciding to produce a 5-minute video that could be edited down to the most appropriate size for an email. Then, they focused on the content, which revolved around the parks’ amenities.
“We focused on entertainment and the varied activities that can be experienced. Things like our indoor and outdoor pools, our live bands, pantomimes for the children, etc.”
-> Step #3. Test video clip size
Working with the promo video, Jacquest and her team tested the length to eliminate two problems:
o File size that email systems wouldn’t bounce
o Download that wouldn’t take forever for recipients to receive
To discover the optimal length, they sent clip sizes to the in-house accounts for their UK-based audience’s 10 most-popular Web mail providers or receivers. “We did weeks of testing before sending the campaign.”
The receivers they tested:
- Outlook 2003
- Outlook 2000
- Outlook Explorer
- Hotmail
- Yahoo!
- AOL Webmail
- Virgin
- NTL World
- Tiscali
- Gmail
From the test results, they learned that clips at 20 seconds were optimal for deliverability. That also gave their audience something to chew on. The 5-minute clip was edited to 20 seconds – or 1 megabyte in file size.
“The length had to do with how much the email could hold. A longer clip would have affected deliverability. Additionally, we wanted to be informative and snappy in the marketing message.”
-> Step #4. Create test design
They picked an Easter holiday email for the test. At the top of the HTML design appeared the copy in blue type: “Fun Filled Easter at Haven!” Just below this was a four-buttoned navigation bar. The copy, “Come and enjoy the Best Easter Holiday ever,” appeared in a white font.
A 320x180-pixel video box appeared when the video automatically started rolling inside the preview pane when the message was opened.
They knew that the video was going to go unseen for some users no matter what they did in testing. For instance, Gmail users who didn’t have HTML images turned on simply did not see the video automatically roll in the message.
Jacquest accounted for those types of situations by including a link to a microsite where a 60-second version of the clip could be seen. The email copy for the link read: “If you can’t see our video … Click here.”
-> Step #5. A/B test subject lines
Jacquest and her team also tested the word “video” in the subject line – even if the copy got a bit long. “I normally try to keep subject lines’ characters under 45,” she says.
Here are the two subject lines they tested:
#1. “Picture yourself at Haven this Easter, watch our video now” (58 characters with spaces)
#2. “Come and enjoy the Best Easter Holiday ever!” (45 characters with spaces)

RESULTS
Plain and simple – embedding a video in emails worked. The Easter campaign become a smash hit with a 3.38% conversion rate – 50.2% higher than previous non-video campaigns. “Our average conversion rates were ranging between 2% to 2.5%,” Jacquest says. “So, the 3.38% was great, exceeded our expectations and was an ROI winner.”
Although Jacquest and her team weren’t able to track how many of those ticket buyers viewed the email in the body vs. on the microsite, they were thrilled to see conversions rise significantly.
Another point of great importance was the fact that the 20-second clip got through to inboxes with a deliverability rate of 96%. It showed that, if done correctly with attention placed upon sender reputation and thorough testing, video can work in the body of the message. Clickthroughs also were a healthy 27%.
Jacquest’s hunch on subject lines was dead-on as well. Including the word “video” had a big impact – a 14.6% boost for opens. “I think people are interested in video, and it’s not something you see very often in an email. It’s become more common at websites, but to have it open within your email message can have a strong impact on the recipient.”
In the subject line test, the word video didn’t trip email filters. Both subject lines produced the same deliverability rate: 96%.
Another key lesson learned from their test: Even if the video doesn’t roll in the email body, it appears to create enough intrigue to induce clickthroughs to the clip.

Useful links related to this article
Creative samples from Haven Holiday’s email campaign:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/havenholidays/study.h
ml
Red Eye International - Haven Holiday’s ESP and video technology provider:
http://redeye.com/
Haven Holidays:
http://www.havenholidays.com/

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30655&pop=no#

Five Ways to Make SEO Work for You

How much attention do you pay to search engine optimization? Many marketers give it short shrift, not understanding that it can be the difference between success and failure.

Here are five tips that will help you put SEO to work for you.

1. Develop good, high-quality content. Before you pull visitors into your site through SEO, you should first have a foundation of first-rate content that has relevant benefit to your visitors. Implementing SEO practices before making your site a useful stop for consumers means they will likely leave just as quickly as they came.

2. Use searchable, rational keywords. Now that the foundation is laid, you need to have the right amount of keyword density. First of all, remember to not put too many keywords onto your Web pages, as some search engines will label your site as spam for having too many. Five% or less keyword density is a good amount.

To build up your keyword density, replace generic terms with keywords specific to your industry. For example, Avidian’s homepage contains the header “Compare CRM Software” rather than a more generic phrase such as “Compare Competitors.” This helps get the right message to customers and search engines alike.

3. Build relevant external links. Getting other influential Web sites to link back to you can equate to as much as 70% of your SEO efforts.

Here are a few current best practices when building external links:

· Relevant content: Develop articles and other content that others will want to display and link to on their sites.

· Pay for it: Serve as a sponsor on an applicable site.

· Say please: Ask nicely and hopefully they will link to your site because they want to support you.

4. Build relevant internal links. Building relevant internal links is a much easier process yet it is still important. Including numerous internal links on all of your Web pages to other places on your site is essentially giving search engines suggestions of the most important pages on your site.

When building internal links you should keep these tips in mind:

· Use HTML for inbound links: Search engines don’t like Flash and Java, stick with HTML links.

· Link from your most important pages: Search engines give more credence to links on home pages.

· Link to pages using relevant keywords: Consider what you are using for your anchor text. For example, rather than saying, “For more information, click here,” place the link within a sentence containing the name of the product.

5. Track and review your data to continuously improve. In order to continually improve your SEO processes, you need to understand the consumer behavior on your site. At Avidian, we’re constantly looking at what keywords are bringing people to us, where the traffic is coming from, what pages they are visiting and what actions they are taking. This helps us determine how we can further improve our SEO efforts.

http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/search/seo_0617/

Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy

People often ask me about search engine optimization. In particular, many ask what search engine marketing techniques they can use on their site to "get high rankings."

Inevitably with most of these requests, I find that the site that they want optimized sucks. It's poorly written. It goes on and on in an egotistical way about what the company's products do. It's filled with gobbledygook.

I tell these people that they need to understand buyers and create some great content that people want to consume. That way, they will get high rankings as the search engine algorithms reward the great content.

Usually I get pushback. People say they just want to an agency to "tweak our existing Web pages."

"Sorry," I say. "Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it less crappy." And I go on to give examples of how valuable Web content drives high rankings.

I’m amazed by how some interesting content (a blog post, an ebook, or a web page) can generate high rankings for a tiny company, way above the big famous organizations.

Consider these examples from my own efforts:

A few months ago, I did a blog post about my participation at the Milken institute global conference. This is a big event (over 3,000 people attend), it has been going on for more than a decade, is covered by the business TV networks like FOX Business and Bloomberg as well as dozens of magazines and newspapers, and speakers include Nobel prize winners. This year Arnold Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt were some of the speakers. Yet my little blog post is on the top page of the search results for the phrase Milken institute global conference.

Early this year I published The New Rules of Viral Marketing ebook. Prior to putting out the ebook, my site and blog were ranked way down in the results for the phrase viral marketing. Now, because of an ebook that has been downloaded 150,000 times, my site and my blog are ranked numbers 11 & 13 out of 4.8 million hits.

http://www.webinknow.com/2008/06/search-engine-o.html

Newspaper Ads Help Drive Consumers to the Web

Some 44% of people who saw a product or service advertised in a newspaper in the past month researched it - and two-thirds (67%) of that group went online to find more information, according to a Google-commissioned survey from Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo.

The survey of 1,003 search-engine-using adults who also read newspapers (an estimated 82 million people in the US) finds that among those who go online to research a product, nearly half (47%) go directly to a product URL, 31% go to a search engine, and 22% go to another site:

Some additional findings from the study, below.

Effect on Purchasing

Some 42% of respondents reported that in the last month they purchased at least one product they had seen in the newspaper.

Most of them (83%) purchased at least one thing from a store or dealer; the second most common purchase venue was online (38%):

Among those who go online after seeing ads in newspapers, nearly 70% make purchases following their additional research.

Multi-channel Ads Increase Trust/Likelihood to Buy

Seeing products and services advertised in multiple channels increased both consumer trust in them and likelihood to buy.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said seeing a product in the newspaper after seeing it online would make them trust the product more. More than half that group (52%) said they would be more likely to purchase the product if they saw a newspaper ad for a product they already knew about from the internet.

When rating which media are better for different functions, respondents considered the newspaper more useful for learning about promotions (68% - vs. 42% for the internet) and deciding where (54% v. 45%) and when (43% v. 30%) to buy:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/newspaper-ads-help-drive-consumers-to-the-web-4931/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

How-To: 7 Tactics for Getting Online Readers to Stick

This article was written by CEO Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs. It works best for those seeking to build brands through blogging, but is also adaptable to companies wishing to maximize their online content development.

Here are seven tried and tested methods to get visitors to become regular readers, be it through RSS subscriptions or simply by reading a good amount of posts. All of these methods, used in conjunction, tripled my RSS subscriber count in April.

A note on traffic.

"Steroid traffic" is a term I coined to mean quick surges of traffic that don’t necessarily average more than 1.1 pageviews per visitor. It has short-term benefits and the visitors rarely stick around.

In contrast, natural traffic — traffic from search engines or referrals — averages well over 2.0 pageviews per visitor and generally become repeat visitors. This piece focuses on generating natural traffic.

1. Use a highly visible Feed Button. Make sure you have a BIG RSS button near the top of your site and also in your sidebar. If you need Feed Icons, check out FeedIcons.com, which has a downloadable package of customizable ones.

2. Include this magic sentence after each post. As soon as I modified my template to include the following sentence after each post, I saw RSS subscribers go up significantly. The magic line is, "If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed." You can use a derivative of that, but anytime someone finishes reading a post you wrote, that option will be presented directly in front of them.

3. Install this plugin. Anytime someone finishes reading an article, what do they do? They either leave a comment, leave your site, or read another article. How do you get them to read another article? Install the Related Posts plugin. I have it set to display 7 other related posts readers might be interested in. As soon as I installed that plugin, I saw my P/V ratio (pageviews per visitor) go way up.

4. Ask questions.install a poll and ask a question which will benefit you, such as, “what do you want to see more of on this blog?” I used the answers to that question to help further define the focus of my blog.

5. Offer a full feed RSS. RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, is a popular way to read blogs and stay up to stay on multiple news sources. If you offer a full feed RSS and do not cut off your posts (in your RSS feeds), you will definitely see readership increase. You may have to sacrifice readers visiting your site to read an article, but the goal is to build readership for the long term. If they want to leave a comment, they will have to visit your blog anyway.

6. Be highly reachable. I use a plugin called Comment Relish to send an email to every new visitor who leaves a comment. In this email, I include all my instant messenger (skype, aim, msn gtalk) usernames and encourage them to contact me about anything.

7. Host a contest. Contests are a great way to give back to readers and encourage community participation. I just finished hosting my first contest and it was a great success. I saw a ton of new visitors and a met some new people. Try to make the contests somewhat interesting and encourage people to talk about it.

Those methods have helped my blog increase its traffic, RSS subscribers, and overall reader interaction significantly over the past few months. You can see the percentage of repeat visitors by monitoring the repeat visitor rate in your stats software. (Generally, anything over 50% of considered a good repeat visitor rate.)

What other methods have you used to get visitors to stick around on your blog?

If you're a personal blogger, it can be beneficial to have a home affiliate business; banner advertising on its own can generate money for the webmaster. But it is essential that one know how to operate this business. To do so there are training programs which can help you learn new skills, such as Microsoft training.

Besides that, SEO techniques should be implemented to increase site traffic. Constant changes need to be made to keep users up-to-date; use a broadband connection for fast updating. The domain name itself should specify what the site is about. Finally, it's smart to go for hosting services which provide free site hosting to save money.

http://www.marketingvox.com/how-to-7-tactics-for-getting-online-readers-to-stick-039155/?camp=newsletter&src=mv&type=textlink

How School Doubled Enrollment With Multichannel & Lead Nurturing Program

SUMMARY: Prospects for your products and services can come from anywhere and show up at almost any time. But how do you get those leads in the first place and keep them “warm” once they’re in the pipeline?
See how a school’s marketing team doubled enrollment with a nurturing campaign that included targeted online advertising, search, telemarketing and email.

CHALLENGE
Adult distance learners are a difficult demographic for colleges to attract. It’s not like targeting high school students within a certain radius and knowing that many of them will be interested in you simply because of your location.
Ronald Kennedy faced this dilemma when he became Executive Director, Distance Learning and Graduate Studies, Liberty University, about 2 1/2 years ago. He was charged with increasing the college’s distance learner enrollment, which was about 12,000 students when he took over. At Liberty, adult and distance learners are almost one and the same -- 60% to 70% are 30 to 45 years old.
Adult distance learners also can enroll at almost any time, unlike traditional college students who typically start in the fall. And there’s plenty of competition from colleges like The University of Phoenix, which offers courses to working adults online and in local learning centers nationwide.
“It’s a very competitive field out there going after the adult learner,” says Kennedy.
CAMPAIGN
Kennedy and his team devised a strategy that focused heavily on online ads, interactive lead generation and Liberty’s brand identity to attract adult distance learners and keep them interested as prospects.
Here are the seven steps they followed:
-> Step #1. Analyze demographics of each degree program
Kennedy and his team first conducted a detailed demographic analysis of each of the college’s more than 35 distance learning degree programs.
They compiled this data by:
o Extracting the student profiles of each degree program
o Breaking down profiles by gender, age, household income, etc.
o Matching the demographics to websites for targeted advertising
“We get a lot of traffic that we can’t effectively source back to any particular channel,” Kennedy says. “That relates directly to our strong brand identity.”
-> Step #2. Leverage existing brand
Next, they took advantage of the school’s reputation for having one of the oldest distance learning programs. The team also leveraged the college’s conservative faith-based approach to education in their messages to stand out from secular schools offering online courses.
-> Step #3. Target online ads to matched websites
Kennedy and his team ran banner ads primarily on two types of sites:
o Ones that appealed to the demographics of Liberty’s online degree programs
o Ones that affiliated with education, specifically online education
“We’re targeting a student who is potentially going to take classes online, so there’s already an affinity that they live online.”
An example of matching demographics to degree: They advertised the school’s seminary degree program -- with a 95% male demographic -- on sites that appealed to Christian men.
-> Step #4. Qualify the leads
Prospects who clicked on the banner ads were directed to a landing page with a form containing qualifying questions to weed out those who weren’t a good fit. “On the back end, we do append some information to the lead to try to tell us internally who’s most likely to convert more than others, and we’ll gear our strategy in-house to that,” Kennedy says.
Qualifying these potential students was very important because adult learners are expensive leads to generate and nurture. Adult learners often won’t enroll in an online degree program for up to a year after giving their information to Liberty. This means the team has to spend more money to keep the brand name in front of the lead for extended periods of time and they didn’t want to waste money and internal resources on leads that weren’t going to convert.
-> Step #5. Invest in matching services
Kennedy and his team also spent some of their marketing budget on a service that matched programs with students to develop more qualified leads. Here’s how that worked:
- The service provider used search engine marketing and an extensive keyword campaign to drive traffic to Liberty’s website.
- Then, they collected the demographic and contact information from the leads and matched them with the most compatible degree program at the university.
“We liked the strategic analysis they were willing to provide on the leads we were getting to help optimize and bring in better quality, as well as analysis they did with SEO and purchasing,” Kennedy says.
-> Step #6. Create landing page
Higher quality leads were directed to the landing page, which included a description of the university and information about it being ranked No. 3 on the Online Education Database’s 2008 list of online universities in the United States.
The landing page asked visitors to enter:
o Name
o Address
o Email
o Phone number
o Good time to call
o Degree program of interest
“The easier you make that form, the more leads you’re going to get,” Kennedy says.
As soon as visitors submitted their information, they received an immediate reply email. They also received a telephone call within 15 minutes. This was an extremely important part of the nurturing strategy because “in this business speed wins,” Kennedy says.
That nurturing strategy consisted of three parts:
Part 1. Phone call
Telemarketing calls were the No. 1 method Kennedy and his team used to follow up with qualified leads.
Part 2. Email
Email was second -- and the longest lasting of the three strategies because it was the cheapest.
The emails contained:
o A link back to the school’s distance learning website
o “Real life” situations in the messaging
o Emphasis on the ultimate goal
o Call to action
Instead of just telling adult learners how convenient online classes were, the team described how inconvenient it was to find a baby sitter after work or to fight traffic to take classes on a campus. They juxtaposed that scenario with coming home, making dinner and then working on the computer for a couple of hours to take classes.
The team also invited leads to call or email the university for more information or to chat live with an admissions counselor or academic adviser online from the school’s distance learning site.
Part 3. Direct mail
Direct mail was No. 3. “We try to hit them with all the different communication styles that are available to keep our name and brand in front of them vs. our competitors,” says Kennedy.
-> Step #7. Test, test, test
The team analyzed traffic patterns and continually looked for more effective keywords. They also conducted split tests on creative, including the online ads and landing pages.
Testing was especially important when determining how many qualifying questions they should ask a lead, Kennedy says. The team did split tests between longer, more detailed forms vs. shorter forms.

RESULTS
Enrollment in Liberty’s distance learning program shows the campaign’s overall impact: in 2 1/2 years, Kennedy and his team have seen a 108% increase to more than 25,000 students.
Other results:
o 3% to 5% clickthrough rate on banner ads with targeted audiences
o 0.5% to 1% clickthrough rate on paid search ads
o 2% to 5% clickthrough rate on trade name search
o Higher clickthrough rates on Christian sites vs. secular sites
“I think through doing more target marketing, more demographic type research it’s really paid off in terms of what we’re seeing at the back end as far as enrollments,” Kennedy says.
As for how many questions they should ask a lead, the shorter forms proved to be more successful, Kennedy says. But it was a balancing act. “We’re constantly honing out how many questions we’re asking vs. how many we’re going to have to qualify.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30632